"I know I’m a strong boy. I don’t think there are many footballers out there who can go toe to toe with me," says Northampton's Ade Akinfenwa. Photograph: Sam Holden for the Guardian

"For breakfast I just have a green tea and maybe a croissant," Ade Akinfenwa says, leaning back in his cafe chair, a chair that from the opposite side of the table already has the glazed and hangdog look of a chair that never expected anything like this, a chair in the process of being – in the style of many a League Two defender – schooled, muscled and generally rippled into submission by the notorious Akinfenwa physique.

So, this croissant then. Presumably it's served with a cow wrapped around it. Or impregnated with plutonium. Obviously, these words are not spoken out loud by your interviewer, despite the fact the delightfully charming Akinfenwa shows every sign of conforming to the stereotype of the gentle giant. But the fact remains he is still a giant, even judged solely by the sheer scale of his alarmingly well-developed biceps, biceps the size of a sack of gunpowder, or a medium-sized haunch of ox, so large they probably have a separate biological name, like biceptionals or biceratopses.

There has for the last few years in English football been a tendency among players towards a certain physical dwindling away. Basically, they're getting smaller. Not shorter, or less powerful: just more obviously lithe and toned. Where centre-halves were once hulking and centre-forwards were bulls and battering rams, at the top end they tend now towards the same slim-fit silhouette, a state of homogenised peak athleticism that reflects the sport's retreat from concussive physicality towards a more gymnastic, stamina-based discipline. But then, of course, there are exceptions.

Akinfenwa, who will lead Northampton Town's attack against fellow League Two play-off chasers Oxford United on Saturday, is a footballer of distinction for various reasons. With 127 goals over a decade-long career, the 30-year-old Akinfenwa is by now an established gun-for-hire of the lower leagues. Above all, though, he is a whole lot of Ade Akinfenwa. For the likeable Akinfenwa, a cultish fans' favourite at most of his past clubs, a more codified kind of fame arrived last year when he was rated by the Fifa Football computer game the strongest footballer in the world, tribute to the striking spectacle and often devastating effect of his gym-honed 16 stone, 6ft 1in physique (by way of comparison: Theo Walcott weighs 68kg; Akinfenwa is about a Walcott and half).

TV appearances and magazine interviews have followed – one newspaper sent a photographer to watch him bench-press his top weight 180kg – not to mention at least eight fake Akinfenwa Twitter accounts, testimony to his hugely likeable big-man's charisma. English football has always loved a strongman and in Akinfenwa it boasts not just a strong man but the strongest man, a centre-forward whose playing style ("I'm never going to be running the channels 20 times, but you play for the team – Messi's never going to play with his back to goal") seems to speak to all those other fondly recalled big men, from the classic 1950s centre-forward, right back to William "Fatty" Foulke, legendary 22st Sheffield United goalkeeper of the early 20th century.

Not that Akinfenwa is particularly bogged down in his place in the scheme of these things. Mainly he's just really pleased to be appreciated. "The last two years running on Fifa I've been acknowledged as the strongest person in the game," he grins. "I'm not going to lie, there's accomplishments that you look at – ask any kid do you want to be in Fifa, they'd love it. It's like being the fastest in the game. For Fifa to acknowledge me it is insane. I know I'm a strong boy. I don't think there are many footballers out there who can go toe to toe with me."

Now you're talking. So who would he like to test himself against? "To be honest I want to see the Premier League ones. The lower leagues, we're a bit more on the battling thing. The Prem is a bit more graceful, but the so-called hard ones, the Vidics, the Terrys, they're the ones I want. I am probably stronger than them. John Terry, size-wise even my arms are probably the same size as his legs. I'd have loved to play against Sol Campbell, Marcel Desailly. Vincent Kompany, he looks like a big boy. And that's one reason fans take to me. They like the battle side of it. They look at me and think this guy shouldn't be on the pitch, he's just bulldozing his way through. Sometimes it's nice to be a bit different."

There is also a word of respectful fellow-feeling here for another big-boned striker: "I buzz off Wayne Rooney. Wayne Rooney gets all slack and that and people get at him but I think he's a bad boy. He's got that aggression. People say he's big, I don't think he's big whatsoever. That baffles me. Some people just love to highlight the negative, regardless of what he's done, what he keeps doing."

Akinfenwa himself is busy outside football, fronting up a clothing line called Haha, a reference to those who – presumably from a safe distance – once laughed at his desire to become a footballer. Plus his specialised "Beast Mode On" brand, whose name is taken from the title of a viral internet video. Happily on a drizzly Wednesday morning in south London Akinfenwa is as yet not in beast mode, instead lingering in polite and articulate interview mode (later he would briefly slip into semi-beast mode for the benefit of the Guardian snapper, flexing his pre-flexed muscles to an ever greater scale and politely adopting a slightly cross expression).

And in truth Beast Mode On is more a follow-your-dream kind of shtick. Understandably so, given that for Akinfenwa success as a professional footballer arrived only after a degree of real struggle. An Islington boy of Nigerian emigre parents and a lifelong Liverpool fan – "John Barnes was my hero. I just wanted to be him, the way he graced the pitch" – his desire to play professional football was tested by serial early rejection, most citing his size and a perceived lack of fitness. Having skulked around on the fringes, Akinfenwa abruptly left for Lithuania aged 18. A family contact provided a link to Lithuanian club FK Atlantas, and also for the teenage Akinfenwa an escape from the temptations of the occasionally mean streets of north London.

"Some people have embellished it a little bit," he says now. "Like anybody there was the opportunity to go down the wrong path, hanging with the wrong people. I was trying to get into football and when I was at football I was 100% focused, but it was getting me there from the night before."

Not that the port city of Klaipeda was any kind of soft landing. Looking back Akinfenwa suspects he may have been the first black man ever to play in Lithuania. Certainly the level of racial abuse was rabid. Albeit in time Akinfenwa not only rose above it but attained an unlikely kind of Baltic celebrity.

"I was 18 years old, I was a big black guy even back then, I went to Lithuania and my first pre-season game the chant was 'Zigga, zigga, zigga, shoot the fucking nigger'. I was just like: 'Oh my days.' The fans were right by the touchline. I'm running for the ball, they're doing monkey chants. It was mind-blowing.

"My brother said to me, well, come home if you want. Or you can stay and prove them wrong. I'll always remember that. Throughout the whole season the abuse was there, but I stuck through it. Got to the equivalent of the FA Cup final and scored the only goal, and it flipped it. I won't say I had like Beckham status, but suddenly everybody knew me. I opened an Adidas store. From my own fans it completely changed. It was just ignorance before."

After which Akinfenwa returned to England resolved to find a slot for his outsized silhouette. A successful spell at Torquay was followed by a move to Swansea where he scored the first ever goal at the Liberty Stadium, and then via assorted pit stops to Aidy Boothroyd's Northampton. Albeit for Akinfenwa there remains that desire to test himself at a higher level. For a footballer possessed of at least one outstanding attribute – here strength – there must always be the temptation to wonder how far your super power might have taken you. And even if you suspect Akinfenwa, in an imaginary Rollerball-derived version of the sport, would gobble up the likes of Terry like a green tea-dunked French pastry, in the real world his bullocking style, beast mode on or off, is only ever like to serve to emphasise the sheer diversity of the professional game at its highest and lowest levels.

As the man himself says: "That's what Beast Mode On stands for. Don't let people define your limitations for you. It does sound a bit cliched but that's what I truly believe. For all the people who say you can't do that, I'm a hundred plus goals later. That's Beast Mode On."